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Hans Hofmann profoundly
influenced the development of American art in the 1930s and ’40s, representing
a crucial link between European formal innovations of the early 1900s and
Abstract Expressionism in America.

Hofmann enrolled in art
school in Munich in 1898 and lived in Paris from 1904 to 1914, where he
familiarized himself with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and witnessed
the emergence of Fauvism and Cubism. Caught in Munich by the outbreak of World
War I,...

Hans Hofmann profoundly
influenced the development of American art in the 1930s and ’40s, representing
a crucial link between European formal innovations of the early 1900s and
Abstract Expressionism in America.

Hofmann enrolled in art
school in Munich in 1898 and lived in Paris from 1904 to 1914, where he
familiarized himself with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and witnessed
the emergence of Fauvism and Cubism. Caught in Munich by the outbreak of World
War I,...

Hans Hofmann profoundly
influenced the development of American art in the 1930s and ’40s, representing
a crucial link between European formal innovations of the early 1900s and
Abstract Expressionism in America.

Hofmann enrolled in art
school in Munich in 1898 and lived in Paris from 1904 to 1914, where he
familiarized himself with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and witnessed
the emergence of Fauvism and Cubism. Caught in Munich by the outbreak of World
War I, Hofmann decided to open an art school, and by the 1920s it attracted
students from all over the world seeking to learn about Cubist form, Fauve
color, and Expressionist brushwork. Shortly before the Nazis seized power,
Hofmann decided to leave Germany for good. In 1933, he opened another art
school in New York. He taught art for over four decades, and his students
included Helen Frankenthaler, Red Grooms, Alfred Jensen, Lee Krasner, Louise
Nevelson, and Frank Stella.

Many of Hofmann’s ideas
about painting culminated in his famous “push and pull” theory, in which the
illusion of space, depth, and even movement on a canvas was created abstractly
through color and shape. By placing colors of varying intensities against each
other in paintings like Mirage,
Hofmann derived dynamic form from their interaction as receding areas are
pulled up to the surface and protruding areas are pushed back, perfectly
illustrating his theories about the dynamics of the picture surface. To further
emphasize this kind of tension, Hofmann juxtaposed a central area of dense
impasto with a more loosely painted background. Rooted in nature yet liberated
from its representation in this way, Hofmann’s teachings and paintings made
important contributions to the belief that reality lies within the parameters
of painting itself—one of Modernism’s major tenets.